


Undiscovered country

by flowerdeluce



Category: Black Mirror
Genre: Angst, Chocolate Box Exchange 2019, Episode: s02e01 Be Right Back, Gen, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-11 07:08:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17442263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowerdeluce/pseuds/flowerdeluce
Summary: Waving her only daughter away in a taxi laden with suitcases had been one of her hardest days as a parent. It was good to have her home.Once Hannah had a cup of tea in hand, her socked feet kicked up on the armchair beside her, she finally asked. “Is he still upstairs?”





	Undiscovered country

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asuralucier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asuralucier/gifts).



“Is Ash lonely?”

Hannah’s eyes were closed, her patchwork teddy clutched to her chest. Like most toddlers, she was full of questions at bedtime. While some were challenging to answer – Why does the alphabet start with 'A'? How long will nanny live? Why are ladybirds red? – this one was easy.

“No. He doesn't get lonely.”

Brushing a few stray hairs behind Hannah’s ear, Martha bent and kissed her forehead. The strawberry scent of bubble bath lingered on her skin. Bath time had been fun: playing pub with the beaker, bubbles becoming beer foam Martha pretended to sip before tipping the contents over Hannah’s head and demanding a refund, giggles echoing from the walls. Yet, a memory always lingered. What existed upstairs, above this room, activated within the same bathtub in a bubbling soup of nutrient gel and electrolytes.

The thing upstairs wasn’t lonely; its circuits were dormant when not required. Projecting loneliness onto it was hard to avoid. The idea of it, immobilised and inactive in the darkness, felt uncomfortably close to Ash’s corpse, though her Ash wouldn’t stir awake when she appeared, and she didn’t feel the same longing to hold this one in her arms.

The real Ash wasn’t lonely in his grave. The Ash upstairs wasn’t lonely either.

 

*

 

When Hannah tired of Ash’s limited activities she taught him some of her own. Ash knew all about her imaginary friend – who was responsible for spilling orange juice on mummy’s digi-paint tablet, definitely not Hannah – her favourite cartoon characters, and was adept at playground games: cat’s cradle, What’s the Time Mr. Wolf?, Rock Paper Scissors.

Martha never joined in; she preferred to watch. Sometimes Hannah forgot she was there, supervising.

Not long after Christmas introduced her to the game, Hannah suggested Twenty Questions. Pride swelled in Martha’s chest when Hannah scribbled the Prime Minister's name on a pink Post-It and stuck it to Ash’s forehead. It was only when Ash announced the name of the Prime Minister who’d been in office when he’d died that Martha realised the error of disconnecting him from the internet unless required for system updates. It left him detached from the world, unable to make humorous observations about anything unknown to him.

After questioning Ash on pop singers and current events, receiving only shrugged or outdated responses, Hannah asked to go back downstairs.

 

*

 

The first time Martha left them alone together was when Hannah needed help with her homework; since starting secondary school, she’d had a lot of it. But mum had a deadline of her own – recipe book illustrations, all puddings that left her craving sugar – and didn’t have the time to spare.

She checked in on them regularly, nerves twisting in her gut as she ascended the attic ladder to peek at their father-daughter tableaus: hunched together over workbooks strewn across the floorboards; Hannah sat at Ash’s feet, looking up expectantly as he checked her answers.

This time, Hannah sat listening while Ash read a passage aloud from a textbook. While reading, he glanced at Martha and smiled. She smiled back instinctively.

 

*

 

Hannah pushed the carrots around her plate with her fork. This was another regular occurrence of the phase she was going through: nothing was good enough. If Martha advised her against getting something pierced, or asked her to turn down her music, she was being a control freak. If she prepared healthy meals, she was trying to say she was fat. She couldn’t win.

“Ash doesn’t love me,” Hannah announced, eyes on her plate.

Martha scoffed. “He does.”

“You said he doesn’t feel anything.” She placed her fork beside her untouched meal and met her mother’s eyes across the table. “Are you a liar?”

“Please don’t speak to me like that.”

“What’s he doing, right now?”

Shaking her head, Martha tried to formulate a way to quell this age-old argument before it began. She sliced a perfect square from her pork chop and chewed it slowly. “He’s waiting to see you.”

“No he isn’t!” Hannah stood, snatched her arm away when Martha reached for it. “He’s deactivated! You _insist_ on keeping him locked up there like a prisoner when I’ve asked you countless times to bring him down or at least let me see him on weekdays. If he loves me, and if he’s waiting to see me, why are you torturing him like this?”

“He isn’t deactivated,” Martha said calmly. That was the only part of Hannah’s outburst she was willing to respond to.

“Look, I know you can’t get your head around this, but you were the one who brought him into the world, so it’s your responsibility to make sure he’s happy. Same goes for me. Bring him downstairs!”

“Hannah, sit down.” Again, she was calm.

“No! Why don’t you _ever_ listen to me? You’re seriously fucked in the head if you think—”

Martha slammed her fist on the table, the impact rattling the cutlery. “What I do with him is _my_ decision. That’s final.” She wasn’t going through this again. “Now sit down, _please_ , and eat your dinner.”

She expected Hannah might defy her, scrape her food into the kitchen bin dramatically and throw the plate into the sink beside the soaking pans. She hadn’t expected her to run upstairs and start calling for Ash at the top of her lungs.

“Ash? Do you wanna come down from the attic? Do you wanna have dinner with us?”

When he responded through the locked attic door, shouting back _yes, that’d be lovely, thank you_ , Martha pressed her face into her hands.

 

*

 

Hannah’s first visit home since starting university was lovely if you ignored the elephant in the room. She told her mother about the friends she’d made in her dorm, the eccentric tutors she loved and the strict ones she despised, and only glanced towards the hallway as though expecting someone to stroll in once.

Martha knew it’d be hard to be home alone for the first time since Ash died. Waving her only daughter away in a taxi laden with suitcases had been one of her hardest days as a parent. It was good to have her home.

Once Hannah had a cup of tea in hand, her socked feet kicked up on the armchair beside her, she finally asked. “Is he still upstairs?”

Martha looked away. She nodded. “I haven’t visited him since you left.” (A lie. The third night after Hannah moved out, she’d sobbed in Ash’s smooth synthetic arms and slept beside him on the cold attic floor between shoe-boxes and cobwebs, sharing the darkness with him. She'd been weak, and she needed to be with someone, that was all.)

“Would you ever have him destroyed?”

Staring through the coffee table, Martha shook her head.

 

*

 

Martha wasn’t bitter. Hannah and Kevin lived three counties away, had their own lives, their own children. If they only found time to visit at Christmas, she understood.

Art kept her busy, even if she found holding the pen difficult these days. She was comfortable with her own company and following her two beautiful grandchildren on social media, trying not to embarrass them too often by telling them just how beautiful they were.

She rarely thought of Ash. The Ash upstairs, that was. She often thought of the other one, the real one, though her memories were fading.

 

*

 

The attic grew cluttered. Every time Martha added to the accumulating piles of life's little treasures she didn’t have the heart to throw away, Ash greeted her with a smile. Sometimes, she didn’t bother turning on the light to see it.

 

*

 

“Mum?” Hannah bent over her mother’s chair and adjusted the blanket on her lap. “I need to talk to you about something.”

Martha had a feeling she knew what that something was. She stared into the fireplace. Hannah would speak her mind regardless.

Squatting beside her mother, she rested a hand on her thigh. “Kevin and I don’t like to think of you alone in this big house. It’d be hard for anyone to get out here if anything happened. We want to make sure you’re safe, always.”

It was _one_ fall. Now everyone treated her like a ticking time bomb who couldn’t survive a flight of stairs. They’d moved her bedroom to the ground floor, installed those fancy handles in the downstairs bathroom. She managed. If they tried to make her leave her home, she’d fight them with everything she had.

“There’s someone I’ve been talking to, someone who’d love to help take care of you.” She looked over Martha’s shoulder, then stood, stretching out her hand.

Ash took it.

“Hiya.” He waved, as chirpy as he ever was, as though the decades of neglect hadn’t occurred, like he’d never crashed the moving van, he’d merely gotten lost and only just found his way home. He had new clothes. Modern ones. They didn’t suit him.

Martha squinted up at his ageless face. It'd been years since she’d seen him properly; she couldn’t remember the differences she’d found so noticeable about him originally. He was perfect. And he would outlive her, be there for Hannah now android administrative restrictions were banned. There was no fighting it any longer. No point in denying this Ash his right to… be.

“Shall I pop the kettle on?” Ash asked.

Hannah patted Martha’s arm and stood to walk him to the kitchen. “That’d be nice.”

Before they reached the hallway, they linked hands.


End file.
